Streamline your lead management process flow for businesses

How to create outlook signature

in this month's total crm bytes we'll learn all there is to know about business process flows companies often use business process flows for their sales process customer service or project management but they can be used for so much more in this session you'll be shown how to create a business process flow create some branching for alternative outcomes and to link automation to take it to the next level to start out we first need to cover what is a business process flow and one of the main examples can be found on the opportunity entity i'm going to open up new product interest and you're going to find a typical crm form with one exception which is the bar along the top in this example we are looking at the lead to opportunity sales process which you can see by the name on the top and the left hand side within this process there are four stages represented by circles in the bar with the different statuses on this opportunity we are currently sitting within the proposed stage as seen by the target styled circle you can also see that we have successfully progressed through the qualify and develop stages as we have the tick and the closed stage has not yet been worked on because it's just the blank circle still to update the stage that you're on you just have to click the current stage the one that looks like the target which in this case is propose and you'll find there are some fields for you to input data and then down the bottom are arrows to either progress further through the process by the next stage button or for whatever reason you could also move back to the previous stage with the little arrow just here as well to the right of that you could also go forward and back through the process with arrows at the extremities of the process bar so you can navigate through and then you could set active and then move back to propose to create a business process flow you first need to open make.powerapps.com and then confirm you are working in the correct environment which can be seen in the top right hand corner in this case we are happy with great view but you'll see there are a ton of different options and sometimes it may default to one that is not your primary environment from there open the flows section and then change the tab to be business process flows once there you can press the plus new button and then you need to fill in the key details such as the name and then which entity it's going to be located on and for our one today we're going to be creating a sales process for our opportunity once you've filled that in you can press create and there we go we've now got up the top at the base of our new opportunity process and you'll see it's got this little blurred out area there because it's not live and it hasn't been converted to an active process so to start editing you can see the little pencil here if you click that it's going to open up the new tab for you we jump into adding some of the stages i just like to point out a key feature in the ribbon which is the ability to order the process flow if i click that you're going to see a bunch of different process flows that we have on the entity that we are working on so we have an existing opportunity sales process we have a project service process and we have our brand new great view opportunity process as well so this is the priority and at the moment by default the opportunity sales process would come up first and the great view would be the third option but for now i'm going to leave that as it is because i'm happy with with that position when designing your process there are two components that make up the flow being stages and conditions stages are the standard steps that are taken as you work through your process whilst conditions allow you to branch and alter the flow depending on the values that you input there are also four types of composition steps the main one being the data step which allows you to put a field into each of the stages and it is mandatory to have at least one data step per stage of the process the next three are all used for automation you can leverage workflows and flow steps and you can also then use action steps so the workflows and flow steps are used to automatically perform an action when entering or exiting a stage and the difference is an action step allows you to manually perform a trigger which sets off an automation now getting into setting up this process we first need to name the stage and our first one here we're going to call inquiry you can then also set a category which can be used for reporting as well so i might put that as the qualify category and apply next it's time to add in some data steps and you'll see here if you expand down you're going to see that we have spaces for steps as well as some triggered processes i'm going to click that first data step and i'm going to set this field to be budget amount and i'm going to make that field required and again applying so now that i have my first stage it's time to add in a condition branch an important thing to note with condition branch is that you must use a field that has been or a data step that has been included in the previous stage so in this case we've used budget amount so our condition step here must use that budget amount or we could add another option and then use that as well but it must be included in that previous step so for this condition i'm going to put in place if the budget is greater than 10 000 so we're going to go back to budget amount and say if the number is greater than 10 000. and i've noted it a few times already but it is really important to make sure you always apply at the bottom of the properties pane whenever you've completed a change otherwise it won't save it and i'm also going to rename the display to say budget over 1 000 perfect and apply and that's now going to be in place for me now that the condition is set up where we're saying if it has if the budget is over ten thousand dollars we now have to tell it what happens next much the same as when we added condition we need to add in the stages and again it's just drag and drop and it'll show you where you can where you can place that so whenever you have a condition you need to make sure that you add in one for if it meets the criteria and one for if it does not meet the criteria and for this next stage both of them still may be quote regardless of if the budget is over or under 10 000 but remembering that each time you add a stage you must have at least one data step so even though we've got the branch it may not be happening yet there may not be any differences yet so for both of these it's going to be quote and the develop category and applying and then remembering you also must update the data step as well so just for today i'm going to continue to add budget amount the whole way through but typically what you would do is add in all different fields depending on what the stage of it is excellent so we've now got our quote stage which is the next stage after our inquiry and confirming the value of this opportunity so now maybe let's say for example the quote is over ten thousand dollars which is our top pathway here we're going to want manager approval so again this would be another stage to be included so i'm going to add that in here and call this manager approval and that might be again maybe this is the proposed stage and again updating my data step there perfect so we've got the manager approval and after that our final step is going to be to close the deal so we're going to add one last stage called close which is going to be linked to the close category and then updating our data step awesome so we have all of our stages now but what we want to do is we want this quote step for if it is under ten thousand dollars to still finish with the closed stage as well but we wanted to skip the manager approval stage so what you can do if you select this one you can use the connector option in the ribbon here and select connect and then i want it to link up with this opportunity close stage so now what you'll see is if the budget is under ten thousand dollars it will go through here will still have the quote stage but then it will link up and will end up at the close stage skipping through the manager approval section now the last thing i'm going to do is add in a workflow trigger for the manager approval stage so back to my component section i'm going to add in a workflow once i expand that and drop that in here into the triggered processes and i'm going to have the workflow to assign the manager approval with the trigger beam once it enters the stage so this is a workflow that i've created earlier and the trigger point is the key section whether you want it to happen once it comes into the manager approval stage or once it leaves the manager approval stage so there your two options for triggers when working with the business process flow and i'll show exactly how that works once we jump across and have completed this but now that we've done that it's time to save and validate the business process and what it will do as a part of saving it will also validate for you and you'll see you get this little pop-up here confirming that it has been validated and that looks all happy and good to go and now we need to activate it so it becomes a live business process so as that's saving the final key point is to then make sure that you have the process available within your app so we're going to jump back into our make.powerapps.com and then go to the app section then with the app that you're working with in this case the sales hub you want to select the three dots and then edit in the top right here you'll see there's a section for business process flows and at the moment it's been limited to four so what we need to do is also enable the great view opportunity process otherwise it wouldn't be available when we're using it so i'm going to tick that and then save and publish so that will now be live back in the crm for me perfect and as we've done that that's now fully published and we can jump over into the crm now back in the crm i'm going to create a new opportunity and what you'll notice is that we still have that old process along the top here and that is because at the start when i showed you the order process flow we had the three and again we had the opportunity sales process as the primary one if we defaulted the great view opportunity process that would have been the default option but not to worry once you save the record you do have the ability to swap between the primary process for each opportunity so you do have flexibility of having multiple per entity typically you're going to have your primary one that you're using you know 90 of the time being at the top of that order so it does it does default but for now we're going to call this just review inquiry and then save that and then to change that process you just need to click in the three dots and then process and switch process and you'll see you have the ability to then select the great view opportunity process and we now have along the top our standard process so as i expand the inquiry stage you'll see that we've got that red asterisk here so if i try and progress through the stage it's going to make sure that i fill in that budget man that's because we made that a required field so if i click this and i fill in let's say fifteen thousand dollars you'll see that our manager approval stage now pops up if i was to then change it and have it be under the ten thousand dollars again it would then drop off so we get that nice branching where depending on the criteria that's filled in it will update i'm going to change it back to above the 10 000 and then save my record and then i'm going to progress through to the next stages so as i go through the quote and then i just want to point out here currently we've got the owner as crm admin so remembering we put in that workflow that's going to reassign for manager approval on the entry of the stage so now watching up in that top right hand corner as i press next stage and progress through to the manager approval you're going to see the owner update to jacob who is the manager in this situation there we go perfect that's now being updated and likewise you could then also have it you know reassigned back once it's been approved and gone through the stages so that's a very basic example of what you could do with a workflow and you could do whatever you like with it but just want to give you a bit of a bit of an idea of you can have some automations as you progress through the various stages that's all we have for you today so i hope you've been able to get something out of the session and have seen the value that's a well set up business process flow can provide to you